Notes on Techmeme's new sponsorship model — There's a new area on the right side of Techmeme labelled "Techmeme Sponsor Posts". It shows the latest blog posts from three companies who have chosen to sponsor Techmeme for the next 30 days. — This is the first sponsored material of any kind on Techmeme.

A new kind of advertising — Gabe Rivera has created a new kind of advertising for TechMeme, which he explains here and here. — Simply put: He takes feeds of the latest posts from sponsors' blogs and puts that in an ad box on Techmeme. That's their ad.

Welcome Techmeme Readers — Hi Techmeme readers! We're excited to have you join us. Wink is a social search engine that delivers relevant search results based on contributions and feedback from people. We just recently released beta 2. we invite you to try Wink.

TechMeme Pioneers New Ad Model for Blogs — After well over a year of running TechMeme (and some other impressive, addictive blog/news aggregation sites) with no source of revenue, Gabe Rivera is now accepting advertising. Gabe's ad model befits the nature of TechMeme …

Techmeme using blog posts as ads — On most Web sites, the advertising consists of three types: banners, context-based text ads and context-based links from keywords in stories. Most people ignore them, some block them, almost everyone resents them. — But enough people actually click …

Pluggd to make podcasts chunkier, searchable — Seattle based podcast discovery and management service Pluggd is unveiling a major new feature at DEMO this weekend that combines speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search for and skip to parts of an audio file that are related to topics of interest to them.

'Payphone Warriors' call on New York streets — reporter's notebook NEW YORK—In this era of ubiquitous cell phones, I never imagined I'd be so excited about making a call from a pay phone. — But thanks to "Payphone Warriors," a game in the Come out and Play festival of street games …

If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP — Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion? — Microsoft's long-anticipated replacement for "Win 9x" — the series of releases that began with Windows 95 and ended with Windows Millennium Edition …

MSFT Launching 'Digital Advertising Solutions' — At Advertising Week this week, Miscrosoft is announcing the launch of "Digital Advertising Solutions" and a media campaign to go with it. It's an effort to bring together Microsoft's various properties into a unified platform …

The Future of the Internet II — A survey of internet leaders, activists, and analysts shows that a majority agree with predictions that by 2020: — A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a "flattening" world. — Humans will remain in charge of technology …

More universities banning Skype — In a move that has sparked protest from both students and professors, San Jose State University has become the latest California school to ban Skype from most of its campus. Citing concerns regarding security and consumption of bandwidth …

Samsung Q1-SSD reviewed — We've just come across a complete review of Samsung's Q1-SSD UMPC, the first device in its class with a solid state NAND flash drive. Sammy's had some ups and downs with its Q1 devices over the last few months, giving us all the more reason to wonder what Riyad Emeran of TrustedReviews had to say about it.